Pros:

Cons:

It's not easy to add entirely new mechanics to a carefully-crafted strategy game like Civilization V. Gods & Kings takes two elements that were specifically excluded from Civ V, religion and espionage, and introduces them to a game that was engineered to be as tight as a drum and sometimes as confining as a straitjacket. The results are better than you might expect, but don't expect miracles from gods or kings: Civilization V remains the same game you've always known.

Finding Religion

Religion is undoubtedly the strongest new addition in Gods & Kings. Far from Civilization IV's vanilla-religions, each faith in Gods & Kings provides different effects and bonuses. However, Firaxis cleverly sidesteps making statements about real-world faiths by empowering players who found new faiths to select what traits will define their religion. The player who founds Hinduism might decide that Hinduism, in this particular game of Civilization, is a religion that fosters cultural growth, while Judaism might drive armies of zealous believers into battle.

This siege drove me crazy, but to be fair, what was Constantinople if not a giant map exploit?

The blessings of faith are served on a first-come, first-serve basis.

All of which makes founding a religion a source of great potential power. If you are pushing for a cultural victory, you want to make sure you get to found and define a religion first. That way, your religion gives you the exact bonuses that will benefit your civilization and strategy. The catch, however, is that once one player chooses a religious trait, that option is no longer available to other players. Plus, only five religions can be founded in each game, so some players must make do with others' religious choices, and won't get any bonus traits for founding a religion. The blessings of faith are served on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Religion works so well because it fits neatly into the kind of game Civilization V was at the start. It imposes hard, mutually-exclusive choices and provides narrowly-tailored bonuses that will favor a few specific strategies. The new civs are certainly tuned to take advantage of the new mechanics: the Byzantines get an extra slot for a religious trait if they found a faith, while the Celts are natural founders thanks to the Faith points they accrue from virgin forests. My woodsy Celts were able to found a religion early in the game thanks to the wooded river valley they started in, and then I chose a trait that let them purchase combat units with Faith points. That, plus the Celts' fearsome early-game Pictish Warrior, let me dominate my neighborhood early in the game. Faith also encourages the careful min-maxing that could send good Civ V players on crazy, almost Peggle-like runs of interlocking bonuses, Golden Ages, and Wonders.

My Celts descend on Ethiopia full of Shintoist fervor. FYI, Shintoism likes war and bling now.

That's great if you like the way Civilization V handled victory conditions and building bonuses, but that also turned people off, myself included. Other Civ games struck a balance between planning and reaction. Civilization V has never really encouraged that kind of play, since it is so hard to get even one victory condition, much less two or three. Religion might offer a way to make up for strategic weaknesses, but at its most useful it makes those almost-rote paths to victory even more efficient.

Spies Like Us

Espionage is the other major addition in Gods and Kings, but it does not quite enhance Civ V the same way religion does. Its effects are usually too small to be hugely consequential, and my spies seemed better at annoying other civilizations rather than conferring any kind of strategic advantage.

My spy is rigging elections in the city state of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, my science city is at huge risk of having technology stolen.

Overall, espionage plays such a minor role that I could almost as easily ignore it as not.

Instead of having spies running around the map like a special unit, spies are abstracted into an espionage menu. You have a small set of spies (who arrive at predetermined points in the game) that you can send to different cities around the map. Depending on the city, different missions will become available. In your own territory, they will counter-spy, in another faction's territory they will steal technology, and in a city-state they will work to ensure that you gain influence. Since you only have a handful and their missions take some time, they can't quite tilt the balance of a given game. Instead, they provide a small, intermittent bonus.

That's neat, but I'm at a loss for what it really adds to the game. Even worse, sometimes spies will bring you news of other players' plots against each other, an act of virtual mind-reading that simply drives home how contrived the whole espionage mechanic is. Overall, espionage plays such a minor role that I could almost as easily ignore it as not.

Spit and Polish

So what about all the little improvements to Civ V that Gods & Kings brings to combat, AI, and city-states? That's just the thing: they're little. I haven't played Civilization V in almost a year, and I barely detected a difference between what I played back then and what I'm playing now. A lot of Civ V's major problems were nicely mitigated through patching, and what Gods and Kings adds could be described as Civ V, but more so.

For instance, has the AI been improved? That's tough to gauge because Civilization V favors the defender so much in combat. Getting siege units into place around an enemy city, plus the troops needed to defend them, is enough to give you fits. The AI does a good job of staying in good positions, and committing to massed attacks instead of frittering its armies away piecemeal, which means storming cities is even harder now, but it's still going to have a hard time seizing your territory. I watched a massive gunpowder-armed Ethiopian army shatter itself against a trio of Knights that were holding a river crossing. I'm glad to see the AI start a war with about a dozen combat units ready to cross my border, but it wasn't smart enough to get around the draconian defensive bonuses built into Civ V, or around my flank.

You'll have more chances to rotate units in and out of combat, rather than having them perish after one or two engagements.

Combat allows for more granular damage to units, but it's a pretty slight difference. You'll have more chances to rotate units in and out of combat, rather than having them perish after one or two engagements. As for the improved city-states quests, I still found that cash ruled everything. It goes back to how Civ V discourages taking detours: I'm not going to crash-build a Wonder just because some city-state wants it, nor am I going to sail a small army overseas to go beat up some barbarians. Still, there are a lot of good new reasons to use city-states in Gods & Kings, but there were a lot of good reasons to use them before, too.

Gods & Kings' changes are fundamentally conservative. The stand-alone scenarios are far bolder about changing Civilization V, particularly the steampunk scenario, because they can play around with Civilization V's mechanics while remaining free of its constraints. I wish the rest of the expansion had reduced those constraints a bit more so Civilization V were more open to experimentation and risk-taking, but that's always been my problem with Civilization V. Since its most important characteristics remain intact, I can finally reveal that the real Gods & Kings review has been in your heart the whole time. Gods & Kings is Civilization V with a few new things to do, and a lot of new civs and units. Does that disappoint you, or excite you? Then you have your review.

Spy Guy says: Perhaps, Mr. Zacny, if you were to employ the services of an adept spy, the results would be more than "neat." Espionage and counterespionage have shaped the world! The world! Ahem. Now then, it appears Gods & Kings doesn't transform Civ V as much as we thought it would. Does that impact your interest in the expansion?